Contributing

Vision Pilot is developed in the open by the Privately Owned Vehicle working group. Here is how to join in.

Vision Pilot is built by the Privately Owned Vehicle working group of the Autoware Foundation. Everything - design discussion, meetings, minutes, code review - happens in public.

Onboarding, in four steps

1. Star the repository and read this documentation to get a feel for the project’s goals.
2. Join the Autoware Discord and introduce yourself in the privately owned vehicles channel. A short message about your background and what you would like to work on is enough.
3. Catch up on recent discussions. Meeting minutes and recordings are posted to GitHub Discussions.
4. Join a working group meeting. Weekly, on Mondays, in two slots.

Working group meetings

Both slots cover the same agenda, so attend whichever suits your timezone:

Ways to contribute

Discussions. Propose features, weigh in on open threads, organise discussions, and answer other contributors’ questions in Autoware Discussions.

Bug reports. Search the issue tracker first - someone may have hit it already and found a workaround. When filing, include a minimal set of steps to reproduce. If you plan to fix it yourself, discuss the approach in the issue before opening a pull request.

Pull requests. Small changes can go straight to a PR:

• documentation updates
• spelling fixes
• CI failures
• compiler or static-analysis warnings
• small changes within a single package

For anything larger, follow the four-step process:

1. Create a GitHub Discussion proposing the change, so maintainers can confirm it fits the design direction.
2. Create an issue once there is consensus.
3. Open a pull request referencing that issue.
4. Add documentation for the change - including on this site, if it affects users.

Pull request checks

Two CI workflows gate every pull request:

semantic-pull-request

Your PR title must follow Conventional Commits:

feat(visualization): add occupancy grid colour configuration
fix(engine): guard against null ONNX session on CPU provider
docs: document rrd logging keys

pre-commit

pre-commit runs the project’s formatters and linters. Install the hooks locally so you catch issues before pushing:

pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install
pre-commit run --all-files

The repository configures clang-format (see .clang-format), cpplint (CPPLINT.cfg), markdownlint, prettier, yamllint and cspell. If cspell objects to a legitimate term, add it to .cspell.json in the same PR.

See the Autoware pull request guidelines and license notations for the full house style.

Contributing to this site

The documentation site lives in github-io/ and is a Jekyll site published by GitHub Pages. Every page has an Edit this page link at the bottom that takes you straight to the source file.

To preview locally:

cd github-io
bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve
# http://127.0.0.1:4000/vision_pilot/

Pages are Markdown with YAML front matter:

---
layout: doc
title: Page title
permalink: /github-io/your-page/
lede: One sentence describing what the page covers.
---

Add new pages to the docs_nav list in github-io/_config.yml so they appear in the sidebar.

Code of conduct and licence

By participating you agree to the Code of Conduct. Contributions are made under the Apache 2.0 licence.

Contact

For anything that does not fit a public channel, the Privately Owned Vehicle working group lead is reachable at the address in the onboarding guide.

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